The cocktail strainer , used to hold back the ice while pouring drinks from a cocktail shaker or mixing glass, comes in two main kinds, the “julep strainer” and the “Hawthorne strainer,” each with enough variations to give some insects a run for their money.
The julep strainer is the oldest style, appearing by name as early as 1860 and, as a “cocktail strainer,” four years before that; it is so named not because one ever strained a julep, but rather because it would be placed in the julep glass before it was served, so as to keep the ice back from the customer’s teeth (this usage did not last long, straws being just as effective and much cheaper to replace). All it is is a short-handled, perforated, broad oval or round spoon (indeed, another early name for it was “ice spoon”). It came in two main sizes, each with its own style. The smaller one, sized to fit the small (roughly 180-ml) bar glass, had a scalloped bowl and a decided kink in its handle to enable it to sit well inside the glass. It was probably derived from the sugar sifter, a standard part of a silverware kit. The bigger one, sized to fit the large (roughly 480-ml) bar glass, had a smooth, concave bowl and no kink in the handle. It is difficult to say which of these came first, but originally both were handmade from coin silver, leading to a good deal of variation in detail. By the 1870s, though, both were standardized, silver-plated brass or alloy stampings. What little variation there was is of interest only to collectors. The small bar glass began to fall out of favor as a mixing vessel in the 1880s, and this eventually killed the scalloped strainer. The larger one returned after Prohibition, only now it was stamped out of thin stainless steel, and the silver plating was gone. Used exclusively for drinks stirred in the mixing glass, it fell by the wayside as stirring did. By the end of the twentieth century, it was a rarity, found almost exclusively in bars on the East Coast of the United States, and not too many of those.
cocktail renaissance. There has even been an attempt to revive the smaller, scalloped version, for mixing Sazeracs. See Sazerac cocktail.Perhaps just as old as the julep strainer is the cup strainer, which is nothing more than a handled silver-plated cup with a perforated bottom, and sometimes a flange around its middle so it can rest on top of the serving glass. This was used with some frequency in the nineteenth century, briefly revived after Prohibition, and then was seen no more.
In the late nineteenth century, as the bartender’s craft became more complicated, there was clearly a perceived need for a more flexible strainer, one that could be adapted to the various sizes of mixing vessels in use. Numerous patents were granted, most of them dead ends. In 1889, Charles Lindley of Connecticut came up with a solution: simply thread a coil spring around the edges of the Julep strainer, and, as his patent application claimed, it will adjust itself “to various styles and shapes of glasses, and … fit closely around the entire inner edge of [the] … glass, no matter at what angle the strainer may be placed.” In 1892, William Wright of Boston improved Lindley’s design by making the spring easily removable for cleaning. He assigned his patent to another Bostonian, Dennis P. Sullivan. Sullivan was the manager of the popular Hawthorne Café on Avery Street in that city. Instead of having the holes in the strainer arranged in a star pattern, as in Wright’s patent, he had them arranged to spell “Hawthorne.” The name stuck. The final refinement was to give the strainer a pair of prongs so that it would rest on top of the glass, rather than inside it; a pair of 1907 patents took care of that.
The Hawthorne strainer quickly crossed the Atlantic, where it went through the same process of improvement in materials and aesthetics that the cocktail shaker did (Europeans preferred theirs without prongs). See cocktail shaker. But cocktail bars were specialty bars there; in America every bar was expected to be able to mix a drink, and the quest was therefore to make bar equipment as cheap and simple as possible. The introduction of stainless steel in 1919 saw the end of silver plating and fancy materials. From the end of Prohibition through the 2000s, the industry standard was a steel stamping (with ears, of course) that got thinner and thinner with every passing decade, just as the spaces between the coils of its spring got wider and wider. As with the julep strainer, the cocktail renaissance has reversed that. Materials are better, coils are tighter, and there is another wave of design innovation.
“Rodgers’, Wostenholm’s and Needham Bros.’ cutlery” (advertisement). San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, September 6, 1856.
“Hawthorne Julep Strainer.” Iron Age, April 26, 1894, 823.
Lindley, C. P. Julep strainer. US Patent no. 404,204, May 29, 1889.
By: David Wondrich